I believe it is necessary to change course dramatically from the so-called "reforms" offered by Mayor Emanuel and instead take a new, holistic approach.
The Garcia education platform
My program involves giving the school system back to the people through an elected school board; reducing to the barest legal minimum the plethora of high-stakes, standardized tests by which we falsely judge schools, students, and teachers; placing a moratorium on further charter schools; expanding public education to include pre-kindergarten and even earlier; and reducing class size, which is one of the largest in the state.
We must further provide a multitude of proper books, libraries, and recreational facilities and course offerings in languages and the arts.
As Mayor, I will make sure critical bilingual and dual-language programs will be available to all students that need and desire them. We need a serious expansion of dual language programs into all communities in Chicago. There is solid evidence that fluency in a second or even third language, starting at an early age, helps students academically across the board, putting them in position to be truly college and career ready. These programs are also essential in our increasingly globally tied economy, as recognized by the recently established Illinois State Seal of Biliteracy.
I would like to establish more small schools, such as the one I helped create in Little Village, which includes students from North Lawndale, where several specialized schools operate creatively in a single high-school building.
We can add more excellent schools within the public system rather than adding more charters. We have great selective enrollment schools, which should be used as examples of what can be done within the public system. We should use them in the way that charters were originally intended—to adapt and utilize the techniques developed there to proliferate throughout the system.
The key points in my education platform are:
- Halt school closings
- Restore democracy with an elected school board
- Pull the plug on high-stakes standardized testing
- Stop starving public schools to feed charters
Halt school closings
The recent school closings have been a disaster for affected students and the neighborhoods in which schools were shuttered. We should do all in our power to undo the damage to students and neighborhoods that suffered from the needless mass closings of some 50 schools under the Emanuel regime.
Closings were promoted as matters of economy, yet a recent NBC 5 investigation showed that "Utility bills are almost as much as they were when all of those school buildings were open, and some have incredible amounts of vandalism damage." One building alone will require $12 million to repair.
Restore democracy with an elected school board
We are the only school district in the state with an appointed, not an elected, school board, thanks to state legislation passed in 1995—which I voted against as state legislator. This is the board that closed our schools and cut the education budget, following Mayor Emanuel’s orders. Would this have happened with an elected board, responsible to the citizens?
This raises the question of constitutional rights and civil liberties: the right to elect those who govern an institution so vital to our city. School systems are perhaps the main governmental bodies touching the lives of a majority of our citizens. That's why I believe an elected school board is a constitutional right.
Therefore, one of my first acts as mayor will be to go to Springfield and ask the legislature to revoke the mayoral control legislation and let Chicago take its place with the rest of Illinois by having an elected board.
Lacking action in the legislature, I will file a federal voting-rights lawsuit based on the Constitution and civil rights laws.
Pull the plug on high-stakes standardized testing
When it comes to standardized, high-stakes testing, our kids are over-tested and under-educated. Let's be clear: “grade level” standards in reading and math are seriously flawed from the start. The current “grade level” or passing mark is a number agreed upon in a jurisdiction, usually in collaboration with the publishers of the tests themselves. Even US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan acknowledges that “standards” vary wildly from place to place.
Worse yet is the reinforcement of the notion that testing well in one or two subjects—important as reading and math may be—is any real measurement of genuine education. Educating kids to be good citizens includes teaching reasoning, critical thinking, creativity, about human relationships and so forth.
Making everything dependent on test scores in two subjects simply builds in larger failures. Ultimately it causes teachers, schools and entire systems to narrow educational goals and teach to the tests—or cheat, which we’ve seen recently around the country and in Chicago in past years.
It is especially unfair to teachers to evaluate their performance on how their students do on standardized tests. There are far better ways, including peer review and collaborative teaching.
On testing, according to a recent article in The Nation,"The teachers’ arguments were bolstered by 88 researchers from 16 Chicago-area universities who had signed an open letter to Mayor Rahm Emanuel opposing the city’s plan for using student test scores to evaluate teachers and principals. The letter said, ‘The new evaluation system… centers on misconceptions about student growth, with potentially negative impact on the education of Chicago’s children.’”
Although the new standards for evaluating schools recently announced by CPS are said to reduce the proportion that tests will play in evaluating schools, there is still far too much reliance on those tests—65 percent for elementary schools and 45 percent for high schools.
Standardized test proliferation has given rise to a national opt-out movement. And it is small wonder that thousands of kids and parents, here and elsewhere, have boycotted them. Several jurisdictions including some in Florida and the entire state of Colorado are working on opting out.
I must note that at present I have deep reservations about Common Core, which sounds at first like an improvement on the standardized tests on math and reading, but it was thrust upon the country untried and untested—not ready for prime time.
Stop starving public schools to feed charters
Charter school proponents like Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett, argue that those publicly funded, semi privatized schools offer communities greater choice in education because dropping union regulations enable the schools to develop innovative new programming and thus improve education by creating models for public schools to adapt.
This may have been the case historically, but charters long ago ceased offering anything new that public schools could utilize, particularly since teachers unions in today’s world have reformed significantly, focusing more on education than protecting the jobs of teachers. Credit American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Chicago counterpart Karen Lewis for this.
Critics raise several issues about charters. Students at some perform well, but in Chicago and New York even the best charters are outperformed by the best public schools. Furthermore, charters drain increasing amounts of public money while paying staff lower wages. Many believe that the charter movement’s ultimate goal is privatizing public education.
Further, Chicago has shamefully allowed some charter schools to openly flout state requirements for many years by not offering necessary bilingual services. Many students enter the Chicago Public Schools without sufficient fluency in English nor the ability to master academic subjects that are taught in English. It is critical that Chicago offer the best bilingual education programs so that these students can learn English while not falling behind in their other subjects.
Last year CPS slashed the budget and closed 50 schools, claiming closures will reduce the $1 billion debt, however they have not provided any proof of savings. And here’s Alice-in-Wonderland part: Mad Hatter Emanuel now wants to open 22 new charters, some in areas where he closed schools because of “underutilization.” These will cost Chicagoans $225 million over the next decade.
Why all the new charters? Because they are the new coin of political patronage. A glaring example is the UNO group, until recently led by Juan Rangel, who was forced out after exposes of cronyism and corruption in its charter network. UNO received more than $100 million in state money and Rangel, who earned $260,000 a year, was a co-chair of Emanuel’s mayoral campaign at the same time that UNO personnel worked against Emanuel’s critics in local political campaigns.
One of the first steps I would take is to require that charters report the same data as traditional public schools—and data that is unique to them related to lotteries, student discipline, declines in student population from grade to grade, etc—so that real comparisons can be made to inform intelligent decisions.
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